


The Blacksmith

by MCMXCV



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Enchanted Forest, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Blacksmithing, Dragons, Dwarves, Elves, F/F, High Fantasy, and, because someone left me in charge and im a slut for descriptive narration, dw its gay too, emma has a different last name and you're just going to have to deal with it okay?, eventually, gratuitous explanations of how medieval armor is made, i know you can do it i believe in you, learning a trade, oh my, please note that rating and archive warnings are both subject to change, seriously theres a lot of in depth descriptions of trade practice
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-04-16 21:41:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14173989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MCMXCV/pseuds/MCMXCV
Summary: Some years ago, just beyond the most remote village at the farthest point both north and west of any known map, a baby mysteriously appeared in the flowering grass of the machair.The dragons would not devour her. The fairies would not take her.Though even the gods had left her to die, Emma always held hope that they had some larger purpose for her beyond that of an unwanted errand girl surrounded by myth and rumor. When she has the opportunity to change her own fate by becoming apprenticed to the greatest blacksmith in the realm, she takes it eagerly.It turns out that fate does not need convincing to set itself in motion.





	1. Chapter 1

If on any given day one decided to take a stroll through the bayside village of Baywallow, there are several things that they most assuredly could expect to notice.

First, they might notice that the street they walked upon was made of stone. This was very strange, as most everyone would claim there were too few carts in the village to have any need of pitched roads. The second thing they might notice, upon appraising the road, would indeed be the lack of carts, quickly followed by the third: a distinct noticing of the lack of people. Baywallow was a very small town, the economy of which often struggled. The name Baywallow, in fact, was not even the town’s proper name.

Many years ago, The Village on the Northern Machair had had no name. It was simply known as The Village on the Northern Machair, small, primarily inhabited by humans, and mostly self-sustaining. Being so small and so secluded at the North and West corner of the kingdom meant that the town received few visitors. Their economy was purely dependant on one another and on the whims of the King’s generosity, though being such a small village and so secluded at the edge of the kingdom also meant that they received little financial help from the crown. Thus, the town struggled, year after year, to avoid falling into the pits of poverty that would force them to emigrate en-masse, as had happened to the village that had once mirrored theirs on the western side of the bay.

It was quite unsurprising then when the little village found itself in dire times. The local smithy was The Village’s primary source of income, and when it went up in flames the town had practically no coin to spend. Its inhabitants became disconsolate. It was said that if one looked to the shore at dusk, one might see a man wading into the water, never to be seen again. It was thus that The Village’s closest neighbors to the south began referring to the desolate place as Baywallow, and the name stuck.

Baywallow on The Northern Machair remained a small and melancholy place for many years to come. It wasn’t until a man by the name of Locksley reopened the forge and began to create revenue that things started to look up.

As a boy he was ordinary, by no means anything spectacular, but he wanted to be a blacksmith and so he traveled south to the capital in order to find an apprenticeship. As luck would have it, the old elf who ran the castle’s forge was looking for a boy to help with the daily chores, and so Locksley found himself apprenticed to one of the greatest artisans in all the realm.

Blacksmithing is hard on the body and soul. Had he studied under a human master, then by the time the boy had learned all there was to learn, he would have had a forge to take over and run so that his weary master might retire early and live a peaceful life. As it were, his master was an elf, and as everyone knows elves live extraordinarily long and healthy lives, this was not to be the case. And so the boy Locksley, now Master Locksley, returned to his home on The Northern Machair and had a new smithy built over the ashes of the old one.

He had never had any particular dream to become the savior of his village, but by choosing to come home rather than open a smithy in a more prosperous location, he did just that. And as the years wore on his skill grew, and as his skill grew, his name received more attention.

Before long, twenty years had passed and Master Locksley was the most notorious hired blacksmith in the realm. Knights and lords commissioned beautiful suits of armor from his forge, princes from faraway kingdoms bought his weapons to hang in their war rooms. The work was of such a quality that many claimed it was imbued with magic, though this could not be possible as Master Locksley possessed no magic. Some claimed that the magic possessing creatures who lived in the bay was the cause, for surely their mere presence enchanted the water in which they lived, the very same water that ran the forge’s wheel and filled it’s quench buckets. However no rumor could be proven or disproven, and Master Locksley certainly had nothing to say on the matter. The poor man wanted only to practice his craft in peace and had no mind for silly stories.

Now, surely an artisan of such high demand must require help. Surely such a man couldn’t possibly fulfill so many orders without an apprentice to lighten the load. Well, Master Locksley tried, certainly, but found he had little patience for the spoiled boys who came to him from wealthy families. A blacksmith had no need of a squire, he would tell their parents when he sent them back. He needed a boy who would work, who would get soot on his face and iron in his fingernails. But no family in Baywallow could spare a son, and few wealthy families from the south wanted to send a child to the poorest town in the country, even if it was to serve under the tutelage of the great Master Locksley.

So the blacksmith went on alone. For twenty years he stoked the bloomery, he added the iron and the charcoal, he hammered the bloom until no slag remained. Each suit of armor took thousands of hours to make, but Master Locksley was diligent and was never late to complete an order. This way of life worked, for a time, but would ultimately be its own end.

As it was, one day, at the same time that Master Locksley was carrying a large bloom to the anvil for hammering, a barn cat was frightened by a passing horse and ran screeching out of the bushes, right across the smithy yard. Well, Master Locksley was startled so badly that he loosened his hold on the tongs enough for that large bloom to fall right on his foot. It was certainly broken, though there were no doctors in the village to tell him so. The poor man walked with a limp for months afterward. He found it especially difficult to lift the shovel full of charcoal into the top of the chimney, which was very tall and required a man to stand on his toes. It was during one of these instances, where he was attempting to create a small amount of bloomery iron for a decorative knife, that he was found by Emma Nic Machair.


	2. Chapter 2

Emma Nic Machair was Baywallow’s only orphan. She had been found by the innkeeper as a baby, and not a soul had any clue as to whom her parents might be. The village was small enough that a woman who was with child was not likely to be able to keep such a secret, but no woman that the village knew of had given birth near the time the child had appeared.

Some said her parents must have waded into the bay, so distraught they must have been at having brought the babe into such a life where they were hopelessly unable to provide her. Some believed they were travelers journeying into the mountains just beyond the border of the bay’s valley to seek some sort of aid from the dragons that were known to reside there in the summer months. Once, when she was a young child, a rumor had even spread that she had been sent away from her home by magic, but the magic had missed and landed her in the fields of tall grass and wildflowers that bordered their home.

No one would say so, but the one element of each tale that was never changed was that, regardless of her parents’ reason or method, she had most certainly been left for the gods. Desperate times such as those the village had seen sometimes saw young parents offering a firstborn as tribute in hopes that the immortals’ fury would be placated.

It was because of this that the child had never been claimed. The baker’s wife very nearly took the girl, as she had taken an instant liking to the child and needed an apprentice anyhow, but her husband refused the babe vehemently. He was sure the infant was a changeling and would thus only cause trouble for their business. It was, in fact, the opinion of many residents of Baywallow that the abandoned baby had either found great favor or disapproval with the gods, and neither situation was one any person of reasonable intelligence would want associated with their own affairs. Even the fairies had left her to be found or killed, they reasoned. And anyhow no one in Baywallow had the means to provide for a ward.  

So it was that the child was put into the care of the village at large. Having a lack of known blood or adopted relatives, she was without a family name. As was the tradition for orphans and bastards she was, without thought, given as hers the name of the land on which she was born. And so the foundling became _Ní Machair_ , daughter of the fertile plains.

After several days of trying to thrust the child onto any family or craftsman who might need a pair of hands and several more of failed negotiations with the baker and his wife, the innkeeper who found the infant eventually took her in. Though the town received few visitors for the sake of pleasure, the smithy had enough customers from faraway places who traveled for fittings and consultations and other such things that the inn was kept in decent condition. And for those times when Master Dobhail was taking no new clients, there was the attached pub which was frequented by those villagers who could spare a few coins for a drink. The innkeeper was perhaps the most affluent person in town, next to the blacksmith, and had the room to spare for another body. So he agreed to house and feed the girl, but insisted that he was no father and it was not fair that he be the one to raise a changeling, should she turn out to be such, just because he had found her. So the villagers agreed that they would share the burden of caring for the girl, so long as she slept and ate at the inn.

And so the girl, Ní Machair, known to all simply as _Inghean_ , “the daughter,” became a ward of the village. As a girl, she kept to herself. Even as she lived and aged without incident, many were unwilling to trust that she had not been sent to ruin them. However as she grew and learned of the village’s distrust, she became determined to prove them wrong. The baker’s wife remained a constant in the girl’s life, always encouraging her to show them how wonderful she could be.

Eventually, as she matured, _Inghean_ became more and more beloved. She worked hard for herself, taking jobs of all sorts and learning everything she could to earn bits of coin. She was desperate to one day provide for herself, to show the village that had raised her that she was capable of being more than the product of a fairy-tale. This meant, she decided, that she needed a true name. Something to separate her true self from the hugeness of the myth of her origins. _Inghean_ was the sort of name an immortal had, and she was just a girl. She wanted to be just a girl.

She eventually settled on Emma. It was a good name, strong, and close enough to her first name to be easily remembered. By that time, however, the village was so used to calling the child _Inghean_ that her chosen name was rarely spoken, and anyway, a name was much too important to change on a whim. To change one’s name was to change one’s image in the sight of the gods and that was not a thing to be taken lightly. She was already in a precarious position when it came to the immortals, as no one knew whether her standing was very good or very bad, but they knew it had to be very _something_ for her to have been left in the valley.

Truly, she only minded a little when they called her _Inghean_ . They could call her whatever they liked, but her true name was a special thing just for her. Emma, meaning _whole_ , the one thing she wished beyond measure that she could be. Whole and wanted and _belonging_ . Universal, the daughter of the machair, born wild in a field of grass and flowers and _life_ under a sky misted with the salted air of her home.

 


End file.
